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Monthly Archives: October 2016

It’s been a while since we wrote a new blog entry. We’ve been busy writing a book: Learning to Read the Earth and Sky. After an intense three years of proposing, writing, rewriting, reviewing, revising, editing, and re-editing, we finished our comments on the proofs last week and sent them back to the publisher (Please look for our book from NSTA Press this coming November 2016!)

Thus, we can get back to our blog.

While reviewing the proofs for our book, a line caught my eye as a potential seed for a blog entry: “The important aspects of understanding, at least in science, are found in the process of discovery, not in the conclusions at the end.”

Teaching science is not about what we know–the facts and theories that centuries of study have uncovered. Rather, it is about how we do the uncovering. How can we—not just the scientists–uncover the nature of our universe through observation, experiment, modeling, and arguing from evidence? It is the doing of science that we should be teaching in our classrooms, not the knowing of science. Thus, Learning to Read the Earth and Sky is not about the story of the earth and sky that someone else has told us, but rather it’s about how we can learn to read that story on our own.

That is a true adventure.

Adventure stories have fallen on hard times in the science fiction world—at least adventure as I define it. For me, an adventure story must have exploration and discovery at its heart. That discovery might be internal (discovering yourself), external (discovering a new world or an ancient space ship mysteriously buried in rock on Mars), or intellectual (discovering the workings of a mysterious force or how a strange feature came to be as you find it today). But there must be discovery.

That’s different from Action. The focus of an action story is on conflict and challenge.

It’s also different from the Thriller. A thriller focusses on the chase as the protagonist tries to escape some threat or pursuer that is always just a step behind.

In the Adventure story—or the science classroom–the protagonists are the pursuers as they try to catch an idea, find a lost world, or understand a mysterious event.

I have trouble finding my kind of adventure story in the published books of today, and even more trouble finding it in movies. I wonder if the death of my kind of adventure story began with the emergence of video stores. Adventure stories were lumped with action stories in sections called Action/Adventure. Maybe because they shared a first letter. Maybe because someone imagined that since adventure often has action in it those two genres must be the same.

Or maybe adventure died because we no longer have an accessible frontier. Any frontiers we can imagine are quite far away from what we can reach in the immediate future. Without a frontier to beckon us to explore, our hunger for discovery wanes and we focus instead on the action and intrigue in the more immediate life that we know.

Even so, mysteries remain in science and that makes exploration and discovery possible. Mysteries remain in dark energy, in the unexpected geological activity revealed on the surface of Pluto, and in how the Earth’s core can generate such a powerful magnetic field when Mars’ does not. There are still real frontiers in science. Adventure stories—and good science teachers—can still beckon us to explore them.